Intellectual Basketball

In continuing my current goal of building connections with my students, I had my second student meeting today at lunch time. Xavier brought along a piece of creative writing he had completed in Year Ten; he had received full marks on the task but limited feedback (his words). He was never the less able to articulate clearly what he had enjoyed about writing the piece - in terms of the content, structure and language choices he had made. We looked together at things he could improve further in the next piece of creative writing he attempts - particularly in the area of research and further refinement to promote authenticity, avoid anachronisms, and specificity. The meeting helped me to get to know Xavier a little more and understand something of his ability to reflect on his writing, and to take advice (not an easy thing for anyone to master).

The other aspect of my current goal is to building interactions in the classroom, particularly by using some strategies to enrich classroom discussion. Picking up on ideas from Ron Ritchhart's Creating cultures of thinking (2015), I have made a wall poster and intend to use this quite explicitly at first to shift the conversation from 'ping-pong' (teacher-student interactions) to 'basketball' (teacher-student-student ... interactions). The image is from an online search and I am not sure of the copyright in terms of any reproduction (best avoid). The specific 'passing moves' I am going to try are sentence-starters for students:
* Connecting with what _______ said ...
* I want to agree/disagree with ___________ because ...
* _________'s comment makes me think ....
* If we follow that idea out, then ...